1. Field of the Invention
Embodiments of the disclosure relate in general to the field of computers and similar technologies, and in particular to software utilized in this field. Still more particularly, it relates to a method, system and computer-usable medium for the suppression of managed endpoint (MEP) child events in a network.
2. Description of the Related Art
The demand for greater network bandwidth and availability by consumers, businesses, and government continues to grow. As a result, there has been a corresponding increase in the speed, size, and connectivity of today's networks, many of which are based on variants of the Ethernet protocol. At the same time, there has been a growing awareness by network managers of the need for additional security mechanisms and more flexibility and control when configuring their networks. One approach to these issues is the implementation of a virtual local area networks (VLAN), which has the same attributes as a physical LAN, but allows the reconfiguration of a network through software instead of physically relocating devices. Another advantage of a VLAN is that it also enables groupings of end points even if they are not located on the same network switch.
However, the benefits of a VLAN are often offset by various challenges in their effective management. One such challenge is the management of connectivity faults, referred to within the Ethernet protocol as connectivity fault management. In the Ethernet P802.1ag standard, each maintenance endpoint (MEP) sends out a multicast packet to each other maintenance endpoint defined within its VLAN. If the originating MEP does not receive a response packet from a peer MEP within a predetermined time interval, it may generate an asynchronous event report, commonly referred to as a trap. For VLANs that are large (e.g., 100 MEPs), the failure of a single MEP will result in a correspondingly large number of traps being sent by the other MEPs in the VLAN. For example, a failure occurring at a single MEP within a 100 MEP VLAN results in the receipt of 99 traps due to each of the other MEPs generating a trap when they did not receive a response packet from the failed endpoint within the predetermined time interval.
This large number of sympathetic traps, or child events, could create an event storm, especially in the case of an event occurring on a switch that terminates a large number of separate VLANs. Determining which of these network events is associated with a root cause of a network issue can prove problematic. In view of the foregoing there is a need to suppress child events generated as a result of the occurrence of an originating event on a MEP. However, there is no current solution for suppressing such child events in order to identify the parent MEP event.